Pity the poor guy who bought a very cheap external hard drive in China, only to find that there was nothing inside but a seemingly cleverly configured 128MB USB Flash key.
The sad Russian's story, relayed by Hardmac, is a salutary tale about paying the right price for things.
But there's an interesting tech story here too. It …

What did he expect...

I had an SD card like that

... off ebay a few years ago. No nuts inside, only a 1G NAND chip (probably from the reject bin) on a little PCB with a controller with firmware hacked to believe the chip it was talking to was flawless and four times bigger than it was. I think the behaviour once all the real blocks are used up depends on the NAND chip. Maybe in this case it is simply ignoring the higher address bits.

Fake flash

Here is a lovely long post by a chap who bought as many different Micro SD cards as he could find from a market in China and proceeded to dissolve the lids off and photograph what was inside. It would seem many of the fakes ones are made as 'foreigners' on the same production lines as the real ones (who knows, maybe even by the same workers).

Not just flash

I used to work in semiconductor manufacturing, making mosfets, igbts and diodes. Part of the job was also buying chips from other vendors and taking them apart. Was quite shocking seeing just how badly designed some of the competitors chips were. Mind, the biggest culprit seemed to be Ford who would take a good design and remove key components to save cost, then complain when it didn't work...

I have a similar device...

Except it was supposedly a Kingston DataTraveller 4G. Looks like the real deal, but feels somewhat cheaper (my aunt got it for me tho, so I can't really complain). It even reported itself as a 4GB device to Windows. Only when I copied files onto it and the files were getting corrupted that I realize something was wrong. FSCK it on my Linux box and every three bytes out of four was erratic.

Re: Fake flash

Thanks for the link... Makes me think again at HTC's immediate response to a bug report I filed... I know the bug I filed is a well known one with Android, I just wanted to increase the volume of complaints so it gets fixed, but HTC's first reaction was "Have you got another MicroSD card you can try?"

"No" I reply

"Oh, can I take your address and we'll send you a replacement"...

I'm still waiting for it to arrive, but it does make me think twice about my initial "Wow, what service" reaction... Maybe "Hmmm, been cutting corners eh?" would be more apt.

Oh well, the MicroSD I have is actually fine, I've checked it, it is 8gig. Can't wait to poke about the replacement though.

What planet have you been living on?

Half the "large capacity" USB flash drives found on eBay are configured similarly. It's easy to reconfigure a flash drive to misreport how large it is. So people (idiots, really) will see a 128GB USB Flash drive on eBay for a fraction of what one would cost from a legitimate outfit. Usually it will be a reconfigured one of lesser capacity from a major manufacturer so that it looks like the real deal. It will report the larger capacity to the system it is plugged into, and all of that. The only way to detect it's been altered to report a false large capacity is to run a program like H2testW, which simply does a brute force attempt to fill up the drive and then read it back.

Genius

Not just China...

I'm a teacher in Beirut, and I've seen this over and over with regular flash drives. Students come in with no-name brand USB flash drives, try to copy a file larger than a few hundred megs, and when they try to access it, it's corrupted.

The drive always reports having the full size available, so there's no way of telling that it's a ripoff until you actually try read the data. I've come to recommend that my students buy name-brand USB flash drives from known retailers.

Bought "in China"

I have seen this story on several websites now and none of them give any specific details. It's safe to say he could have bought this piece of crap in any country. (Though it more than likely would have originated from China either way).

That's why I steer clear of eBay, markets, et al. If it looks like a bargain (even if it's only £1 off), you ARE being scammed (to what extent depends on how lucky you are). Buy your electronics from an authorized dealer or other reputable company.

Market traders are all scumbags, and I can say that with all due respect, as no respect is due.

a title is rather pointless

"Market traders are all scumbags, and I can say that with all due respect, as no respect is due"

You've clearly had a bad time, it pays to check that you are buying from a reputable market trader before making a purchase. Personally I've bought loads things from Ebay and Amazon market places and have had little or no trouble with them

Read this one

Drive was pruchased from a market on the Russian-Chinese border, when he went back to complain, the stall was gone. Woooo, spooky. I wonder if there was a puff of smoke just as he turned his back.

The article also says that the firmware was altered to report that it was 500GB, and as files were added it calculated their sizes and deducted them from the available total so it looked like the whole file was transferred but only held 128MB at a time and then started writing over the start of the drive when it was full.

letters and/or digits

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To be fair, the Hong Kong based seller gave me a refund, which I really didn't expect! I think he was probably sold a dodgy batch himself.

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More likely they do it knowingly because they make money even if they have to refund half of their buyers (or however many bother to raise issue). Fortunately it's becoming increasingly difficult to sustain a "business" like that on eBay, but it's rampant on sites like aliexpress.

BTW, if such an issue needs to be disputed via eBay/PayPal/etc, make very clear that the item is counterfeit. If reported merely "not as described", buyer may be required to return it with tracking at his/her expense, which will cost more than the item itself.

Common scam for flash drives on eBay

This is a common scam on eBay. The more capacious USB flash drives and SDHC cards (almost always from China) are frequently set up exactly this way. They report the correct capacity and when you write data to them, it appears to work fine. It's only when you read the data back that you find almost all of it was sent straight to /dev/null.

I have been a victim of this twice. Fortunately, I checked the drive on receipt both times. Unfortunately I only got a refund on one of these two occasions due to the vagaries of the eBay refund system. eBay can be a great place for a bargain but I won't buy memory there any longer after my negative experiences.

MP3 players

ChiPod mp4 player

Mine was physically labelled as a 16GB unit and reported 16GB in the FAT, but was actually only 8GB minus a bit (presumably the firmware). But I was able to format it to the correct size, and it worked quite well until the NAND memory wore out. This was about 15 months of quite hard use.

I informed the seller, and was offered a refund, but I thought that even at 8GB, it was worth the ludicrously low price.

Off-the-shelf keylogger component?

"Closer inspection revealed the drive was automatically erasing itself when full, and they continuing with the process of writing the rest of whatever file was being copied to it. Anyone ever heard of this 'feature' in firmware before?"

Sounds about the right behaviour for a keylogger, could that be the little USB unit just north of the actual drive?

Curious...

Anyone heard of a drive showing as write protected once it's over the real limit?

Not off ebay, this one's from a supplier event. Came with 40 meg of brochures on it, turned read-only once I'd filled 420 Meg of the advertised 2 Gig. Be funny if they'd been sold a bunch of bogus drives for promotional usage.

No Key Logger

RE: No Key Logger

Agreed. Also rather difficult to retrieve such a key logger after the buyer has walked out of your shop.

However, it seems a bit weird that it's presenting what looks like a USB-A female connector, rather than a mini/micro-USB female (at a push, a type B female). And it looks wonky. Such things would have rung some alarm bells with me right away.

Read the small print.

Phony flash cards have done this for years

I remember buying an 8GB Memory Stick from ebay. Seller seemed legit when I ordered it but then some negative reviews started to appear. First thing I did when I received it was try filling it up with files to see if it was genuine. When it wasn't I logged a dispute and got my money back.

The episode made me wonder how much ebay even cares about scams like this. They probably profit from the scam as much as the scammer. First they get listing fees, and when the walls cave in on the scam, they get to keep any funds not refunded to disputes. Meanwhile the scammer has set up a new account and the process repeats.

Anyway I don't bother buying stuff like that from ebay any more. Memory is so cheap it's easier and safer to buy from a large site like Amazon.

Only a partial fix

This will get you a UK supplier, but the item will almost certainly still come from China.

There are two issues of trust involved: (1) Is the supplier honest? and (2) is the supplier competent? I trust most people to be honest, but doubt the competence of almost everyone.

An honest but incompetent supplier may still sell you duff stuff. You will be able to get restitution, but my time in chasing up a refund (even as a retired person) is worth more than the item involved here.

It's gonna kill someone someday !

I remember the early pentiums with fake motherboard cache chips and this practice has been riff through the sector ever since. if if isn't cache its capacitors, now its flash. If its a discrete component someone will fake it.

even so-called reputable dealers

I once bought a brand-name external dial-up modem (US Robotics?) from a Brick-and-mortar store (with initials BB). When I got it home and opened the factory shrink-wrapped box, instead of a modem, it contained a length of chain, encased in a plastic tube so it didn't rattle. I brought it back to the store an hour after buying it, and they cheerfully offered a replacement.

Ah, now, see, that's a common mistake.

See, that's actually for your lawn mower - it's an adjustable-length spinning mower blade replacement. With the right attachment, you can turn a knob to make the cutting area wider. See? Dial-up. And everyone knows you gotta modem lawns. Dial-up modem.

1GB scam

Ordered four 1GB SD's and rapidly discovered that they were all defective after copying a large file to them and Winhexing it to reveal a load of repeated data in place of the expected unique data.

Took one apart and lo and behold 128MB Flash chip.

Got a refund eventually but it took a lot of effort and I had to live with really nasty negative feedback for about a month until Ebay removed it because so many others complained.

This sort of scam is particularly nasty when it results in data loss, some people take all their holiday snaps then find the "new" card won't read anything but the thumbnails back or just fails completely.

Rumour has it that the scumbags are hacking, remarking and selling 16 and 32GB microSD too, in some cases you can't even tell something is amiss unless the chips are X-ray density tested which shows up the single chip instead of the expected 9 or 18 wafers stacked up.

What?

"Rumour has it that the scumbags are hacking, remarking and selling 16 and 32GB microSD too, in some cases you can't even tell something is amiss unless the chips are X-ray density tested which shows up the single chip instead of the expected 9 or 18 wafers stacked up.

Umm the only die stacking you see is occasionally the controller sits on top of the memory chip. How would you stack identically sized dies? You wouldn't be able to bond wires to the obscured ones.

Sending this article to my brother in law

He really does not understand the 'if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is' thing. Had his fingers burned more than once but still continues to buy cheap shite off eBay. His latest proud purchase is a brand new WD 1TB USB3 My Passport for about 25 quid with free shipping from you know where. Obviously he's still waiting.

Oh and the same seller has 128GB flash drives for about the same money. If any of you bargain hunters out there are interested I'll ask him for the link

Some testing...

One of these hardware testing sites - I believe it was Anandtech - tested and changed the firmware of more than one of these cheap-o flash drives.

They successfully changed the drive size from 2GB all the way through 4, 8, 16, 32, 200GB, 500GBs, 1TB, 1,5 TB (or something close to 1,32TB) and then the thing fried when tried to fake 2 TB.

But it was a cheap run too, since they were rewriting just a few addresses inside the firmware. Windows was fooled on the Desktop icon, but on a real DIR command, or a detail window in explorer would tell the actual size.

Taking the chance, you have to be real nuts to buy this kind of product from dodgy providers.